Blood and Salt (58 page)

“He told me you were dead,” Halya says.

“I know. Don’t think about it.” He’ll tell her all about Viktor soon, but not yet.

“How did you find me?”

“I didn’t. I came to see Tymko. He’s dying in the hospital. I wandered into the street and saw all the people. I thought they’d gone crazy, and then I realized, it’s over now.
The war’s over. I walked with them until I was tired. I looked across the street –”

“Who is Tymko?”

Of course she doesn’t know. She thought he was dead. She doesn’t know the men who became his brothers, his teachers.

“Taras?” She takes his hand.

“Tymko is...” He stops as his throat tightens.
Tries to smile. “Listen, Halychka. I have a story to tell you.”

“Dobre.
I want to know how it is you’re alive.”

They decide
to marry right away and the wedding is very small. The witnesses are Nestor and Paraska. Myro comes, and Miss Greeley.
Taras didn’t want to wait for his parents to travel so far. And there is no moment for a celebration with Tymko dying in the hospital, but they will do that over time, in their own way.

After Tymko’s small funeral, they take the train to Spring Creek.
They have written to Viktor, and to Daria and Mykola, to say they’re coming.

Moses meets them
at the train. He and Halya look at each other for a long moment without speaking, as if remembering and verifying what each has been told of the other.
Then without either seeming to go first, they hug.

They stop at his house to drink tea and exchange news. Moses has been to see people who look like him – not only in being black, but in countless small ways. The shape of one person’s nose or another’s eyes; a small gesture or the way a smile forms. The cadence of laughter. Voices that blend like music. No, that are music. When he’s with them, he fits. They are his family.

His aunt and uncle wanted him to stay. Find a nice woman and get married. He did meet a woman he liked, named Esther, but she told him from the start she’d never leave her country, especially not to be the second black person in a small town somewhere south of Moose Jaw. He would like to find someone but thinks that if it happens it will have to be here, in these hills.

He reminds Taras of the story of the old man, Ostap, in Shevchana: “Then ask yourselves: Now who are we?” he quotes back to Taras.

It seems that Moses is a black Ukrainian man of Saskatchewan.

He says he had a lot of time to think on the train, watched over by black porters. They often looked puzzled by him; he didn’t belong in any category they knew. And he sometimes saw white people look at him the way Stover did.

Lately he’s been remembering his time at school, when he was the Orphan Boy. Then he’d had the feeling of being someone special, even if it was for a terrible reason. Even if he mostly felt sad. But he doesn’t think anyone noticed Stover much one way or another. Maybe it’s all that simple: he wanted to be noticed and no one cared. Racism is always out there, easy to learn if you want to.

He drives them to Viktor’s place. Natalka meets them at the door. Halya and her grandmother hold each other a long time, stroke each other’s hair and faces.
Viktor is ill in bed. Something to do with his heart. Natalka’s had the doctor in.

In his room, Halya looks into her father’s eyes. Understands that he’s dying and that he knows it. He holds his hand out to her and she takes it. He sees Taras standing in the doorway and beckons him in.

“I know you’re married already,”
he says in a hoarse voice. “But I want to give my blessing. May you live a long life.
A happy life.”

Halya kisses his cheek.

“Tell Mykola I’m sorry.”

“I’ll tell him, Batko.”

“I have made my will. You and Taras will inherit this land. Will you stay and run the farm?”
The question is for both Halya and Taras.

Taras thinks a moment and nods. Halya too. Moments later Viktor sleeps. He is slipping away. His soul, or whatever a person has inside that tells him who he is, is leaving.

Taras realizes that Viktor has achieved one of his goals. He has become a new man.

A few days later they bury him in the town cemetery. A Ukrainian priest comes down from Regina and Moses is cantor. Daria and Mykola stand beside Taras and Halya.

Taras feels something shift inside him and then settle. He is tied now to this land between grass and sky. He is reasonably sure that he will never again be taken away and imprisoned, and that he and Halya can be together as long as both of them live.

As winter sets in,
the farmhouse takes on something of the feel of a village house.
Taras buys a grindstone to make flour. He braids leather harness for Smoke and works with him in the yard.
Tymko gave Taras the beaded flower from Leah Beaver, and Natalka sews it onto a linen
sorochka
for him. She cooks the most beautiful food, and soon Halya begins to look healthy and strong.

Halya writes articles about Ukrainian issues and mails them to Nestor. They can’t be published with the paper shut down, but some day they might be. On Sundays they pick up Moses in town and drive out to see Taras’s parents.

Marko Kupiak visits them and enthralls Halya and Natalka with birdsong. Natalka cooks cabbage rolls and roast chicken. Nothing is too good for a man who whistles like that, she tells him. If he were young, and single, she might even try to go after him.

“Ah,” he says, “never let a man know things like that unless you’re serious.”

“Go on,” she says, blushing.

Taras writes to Myro, who is seeing a young woman, also a teacher, and to
Yuriy at his farm. He writes to Ihor, who is still at the ranch in Alberta.

The Kalynas – Taras and Halya and Daria and Mykola – and Natalka all spend Christmas in town with Moses.

Moses throws the
kutya
on the ceiling. It will be a prosperous year.

In the New
Year, a letter comes for
Pahna
Natalka Antonenko. From Maryna, written for her by Larysa. The first letter Natalka has ever received. Maryna and Larysa, and Larysa’s son, Ruslan, are in Canada. So is Lubomyr Heshka.

“I gave you such good advice,” Maryna says in her letter, “that I decided to follow it myself.
After Ruslan died, we sold everything we had to buy the tickets. The necklace helped.” And then, she goes on, seeing what they were doing, Lubomyr said that if two women and a baby could emigrate, surely a strong, more or less young man could do the same.

They left the old country a couple of months after Taras and his parents, just in time for all of them to spend the war in an internment camp at Spirit Lake in Quebec. They survived that, somehow, and now they live in Hamilton, Ontario. Lubomyr has a job in a steel plant and a Canadian sweetheart. Maryna and Larysa run a tailoring business and hope to visit Spring Creek some day.

Maryna has become someone’s
baba.

Just before Easter
a parcel arrives, forwarded from Taras’s old boarding house in Edmonton – an album of Arthur Lake’s photographs. Halya looks at the pictures for hours and Taras tells her about the camp. He’s used to making stories now.
When he can’t remember what happened in a picture or wasn’t there when it was taken, he makes something up.

This is what she loves. Stories. She doesn’t mind if some are made up. In fact, she likes the things he makes up as much as the things that happened. They’re made of the same materials.

And then spring comes and a warm wind blows from the west. The air grows moist from dissolving snow and smells of earth.
Taras rides Smoke up into the hills and looks out over the grass. Time to plant their first crop.

PART 7

CHAPTER 47

Going back

August, 1960

The ten-foot fence
is gone, might almost never have been, but anyone who knows can tell where the posts were rooted and see ghosts of the peaked white tents against the mountain.
Yuriy once said he would come back and climb Castle but in the end only came once to look. Gazing up at the mass of rock, Taras doesn’t think he could climb it either, even though he once went halfway up with the Alpine Club. It still seems to deny him entry, despite the months he spent under its cliffs. Like Ihor, he can’t find its spirit.

The air smells good. He doesn’t remember noticing that.

The road they were building has been finished to a higher standard than any of them could have imagined, and paved. Even so, it’s not the main highway between Banff and Lake Louise any more – that’s the much newer Trans-Canada. Their old road seems more interesting, more intimate. It has more trees, more bends, more things hidden. The Trans-Canada seems bleak to him, too much at the mercy of sun and wind.

Against all odds, they made something beautiful.

Taras stares at the camp site until he begins to believe he’s put his fear to rest. Or does he still feel a wordless unease? Will it always be there? All right, then that’s how it’s going to be. He smells something pungent, musky, sees a dark shape move in the trees. In all his time here he never saw a bear.
This surely must be one. He hopes it’s not interested in him. After a minute or so, the shape moves away into the forest.

By the path back to his car, a hank of barbed wire lies coiled like a snake. He picks it up, throws it in the trunk. He’ll figure out what to do with it later, but he can’t just leave it.

Back in town
he sees someone he thinks he knows coming out of the drugstore: Kvitka. Flora. Only she looks so much older, the red-gold hair faded and laced with grey, and it upsets him; she should be as he remembers. He knows this is unreasonable. Another woman comes out of the store and catches up to her. This one’s like Kvitka as she looked in 1917. So this is her daughter; no, granddaughter.

He wants to call out to her, but what is the point of disturbing her, of bringing back that faraway time? At this moment she’s on her way somewhere. How could he have the gall to interrupt that, to force himself on her notice? And what would she think of him now? How old he looks, that’s what she’d think.

She disappears into another store; and he realizes that Kvitka would never have thought any of these things. She would have been happy to see him. Now it seems too late. Or he decides it’s too late. Why is he thinking this way? he wonders.

He walks up to the drugstore. Sees his reflection in the window
.
A still-dark-haired man in sturdy trousers and a black leather jacket with a beadwork appliqué in the form of a rose. Leah Beaver’s rose. He wonders where the Beavers might be now. On an impulse he asks a man in the drugstore where the office of the
Crag and Canyon
is. It feels strange to go in there, although they treat him politely. Apparently he’s now a white man, or maybe whiteness isn’t as important as it was
.
They can’t tell him anything about the Beaver family.

He takes a room at the Mount Royal Hotel on Banff Avenue. Remembers shovelling snow from the walk outside it long ago. As the sun slides behind the mountains, he feels his body slowing. Soon after supper he goes to his bed and falls into deep sleep. In the morning he can’t tell where he is. For the first time he feels old. Maybe it’s from seeing Kvitka and knowing for certain that, like him, she is no longer young. A large breakfast restores his strength, but he wonders how he’ll find enough of it to drive himself back through all those mountains. Back to Saskatchewan.

Getting here was the easy part.

The bunkhouses
are gone but the Cave and Basin pool is still there. He feels a longing to bathe in those waters one more time. At the Hudson’s Bay Company store he buys black bathing trunks. Back at the pool a young man takes his money and points him toward the change rooms. Already he smells sulphur.

He steps down into the water and lets heat claim his body.
A young family splashes each other in a far corner, but otherwise the pool is empty. Except for Yuriy and Ihor floating close by. Except for Tymko when Arthur Lake brought them here after the river. Taras cups his hands and splashes hot water on his face.